Apple has quietly filed for a new patent which details a person-to-person money transmission method which could potentially grab market share from PayPal and Square, and hit the already beleaguered banking sector struggling to keep up with FinTech.

As an Internet-based payment system, most bitcoin transactions today necessitate that users are online or otherwise can print and exchange private keys.

However, Romanian mobile payments provider Netopia mobilPay is now backing a proposal that strives for a middle path. Called OffCoin, the proposal is for a system that allows microSD cards in mobile phones to generate, store, transmit and delete bitcoin private keys.

PayPal has reached an agreement to buy money transfer company Xoom for $890 million, a move that brings millions of international customers to the company.

Xoom bills itself as "an international money transfer service" that allows people to send money across borders. Xoom said it served 1.3 million customers in the first quarter of 2015, bringing in $44.4 million in revenue.

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When Brad Katsuyama came to the US in 2002 to run the trading desk for the Royal Bank of Canada, he thought he understood the game. If he wanted to purchase a block of shares for a client, he could find an amount at a certain price and buy it. But around 2007 something began to change. Increasingly he could no longer get what he saw offered on his screen. A purchase order would get him only a fraction of the shares he wanted, and when he went to buy the rest, the price had suddenly gone up.

As I researched some of the more dynamic and inspirational FinTech CEOs for this piece, I noticed that certain personality traits emerged. These leaders are all interested in financial problems and want to fix them, whether it's by changing existing technology or completely bypassing it. They have a passion for helping people and recognize that by doing so there is benefit for more than just those persons they are directly assisting.